From The Economist’s obituary on David Hockney:
Having decided on the composition, he used props and photographs, played with perspectives, and paced out measurements in the studio: all the techniques he’d learned at art school and since. Mostly, though, he was working from the heart. Painting was how he made sense of the world…
Painting 18 hours a day, seven days a week, he finished it at last the night before the shippers came to take it to America. He felt like his hero Picasso, who liked to say: “I’m not painting; I’m exploring.”…
He stopped worrying about being contemporary and set about creating his own kind of art, art of his own time…
Finding new ways of making art filled his life with a sense of renewal…
Soon he would swap paints for pixels, becoming just as adept at painting portraits and landscapes first on his phone, then on an iPad. In 2012 he covered four walls of the Royal Academy with iPad paintings of one particular bend of one lane in east Yorkshire, on every day of the year and in every sort of light. Just before covid-19 struck in 2019 he moved to Normandy, and posted digital pictures of the emerging spring. These were later turned into a massive galleria, a cathedral of green, enough to fill L’Orangerie in Paris. If his poolside painting of the man in the peachy-pink jacket was a snapshot of a moment when he was 35, he described his final work as his Bayeux Tapestry, a long walk through a whole life.
From BBC’s obituary:
He had simply followed one rule: “Paint the things you love”…
He was single-minded and devoted to drawing. The wartime shortage of paper restricted his early efforts to the kitchen floor and hymn books in church…
Hockney’s appearance may have been flamboyant but his work ethic was Protestant. For 12 hours a day, he worked furiously at his easel…
His work-rate remained prodigious. He placed a sign at the foot of his bed in Notting Hill, telling himself to “GET UP AND START WORK IMMEDIATELY”.
If he grew tired of drawing, Hockney would take photographs, do etchings or design operas. He was haunted by the feeling he wasn’t doing enough…
Few artists have been more excited by technology than Hockney…
Hockney’s new passion was landscapes: the traditional pastime of the weekend amateur.
He moved to Bridlington, where his sister and elderly mother now lived, and began to paint the Yorkshire Wolds.
Each summer, the teenage Hockney had cycled here from Bradford to earn pocket money on local farms.
The countryside was beautiful and brought back memories of working on the harvest and sleeping in barns with his friends.
For Hockney, this was just as much a paradise as California in the 1960s.
He stood outdoors in all weathers, he painted hundreds of scenes of lush meadows and roadside verges. They were often on a monumental scale.
It was an old man’s challenge to an art scene focused on the young, the cynical and the conceptual.
And Shelia Hicks on her work from Maria Popova:
I don’t even think about art. People want to pull me into the art thing all the time… Is this art or isn’t this art… What is art? I think people do what they feel like doing, and not authenticating things. These podcasts and these interviews and this reportage and these exhibitions, a lot of it has to do with trying to authenticate things, validate things. Here in Paris, we have a hundred exhibitions opening every week. What are we validating? And if you’re not validated and if you’re not being exhibited, what are you doing? Are you wasting your time or are you just simply doing what you feel like doing and that you like doing?
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When I made this, I didn’t make it with any intention that it’s supposed to be craft or art or design or decoration. Or what is it? It just is. Take it or leave it.
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